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Notes on the Program
West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein
s early as 1948 choreographer/director
Jerome Robbins approached Leonard
Bernstein with what the composer called in
his diary,
A
a noble idea, a modern version of Romeo
and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence
of Easter–Passover celebrations. Feelings
run high between Jews and Catholics …
Street brawls, double death — it all fits.
Seven years later, when a conducting engagement at the Hollywood Bowl took the
then 36-year-old Bernstein to Los Angeles, a
chance meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel
with playwright Arthur Laurents reignited
the two artists’ stalled plan to collaborate on
a musical. The idea remained dormant until
the day in 1955 when a Los Angeles newspaper headline about Latino gang problems inspired an exciting new path. With the hiring
of 25-year-old composer Stephen Sondheim,
who reluctantly signed on to provide lyrics
only, the final pieces fell into place.
After two years of rewriting and struggles to
raise financing, the Broadway opening of West
Side Story elicited reactions that ranged from
passionate raves to stunned walk-outs. The
latter were sparked by the depiction of gang
warfare and prejudice and its nearly unprecedented body count for a musical on the Great
White Way. The show was largely snubbed at
the Tony Awards in favor of a more accessible
rival, The Music Man.
Nevertheless, audiences in New York and
London (where the show was an instant
smash) quickly caught up with the innovations of Robbins’s explosive, character-driven
choreography, Laurents’s ingenious transposition of Shakespeare, and Bernstein’s
thrilling score, with lyrics by Sondheim, that
included “Tonight” and “Maria.”
When Robbins and Robert Wise joined
forces to co-direct the 1961 screen version for
United Artists, starring box-office favorite
Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer (The
Diary of Anne Frank), the result was one of
the decade’s greatest commercial and critical
triumphs. The film’s co-stars, George Chakiris (Bernardo) and Rita Moreno (Anita),
took home Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Actress. Their victories
were echoed by Oscars for Best Art Direction–Set Decoration, Color; Best Cinematography, Color; Best Costume Design, Color
(winner Irene Sharaff had also worked on the
Broadway production); Best Film Editing;
IN SHORT
Born: August 25, 1918, in Lawrence,
Massachusetts
Died: October 14, 1990, in New York City
Work composed: The musical West Side
Story was composed principally from the fall
of 1955 through the summer of 1957.
World premiere: The musical was premiered
on August 19, 1957, at the National Theater in
Washington, D.C.; the film was premiered
October 18, 1961, in New York City.
New York Philharmonic premiere and most
recent performance: complete film with live
score, performed September 7–8, 2011, David
Newman, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 154 minutes
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Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture; Best
Sound; Best Director (for both Robbins and
Wise, the first time this award was shared);
and Best Picture. Jerome Robbins also received an honorary Academy Award “for his
brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” Location filming also lent an
air of authenticity, as dance sequences were
filmed along 68th Street, between Amsterdam and West End Avenue, where tenement
buildings were soon to be demolished for the
building of Lincoln Center (although the
playground location was at 110th Street between Second and Third Avenues).
This presentation of West Side Story, the
motion picture, is in a format that brings
its own innovations. For the World Premiere
of the complete film with live score performance at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2011, MGM created a restored, highdefinition print of the film that revealed
details unseen since 1961. A new sound technology developed by Paris-based Audionamix
and utilized by Chace Audio by Deluxe —
one of the film industry’s top restoration
companies — isolated vocal tracks from the
feature, using new technology to separate elements within a monophonic sound track. In
the case of West Side Story, Audionamix
“taught” its technology to recognize and then
remove orchestral elements on the sound track
while retaining vocals, dialogue, and effects.
Although the original musical materials
for the movie arrangements had been lost,
The Philharmonic Connection
Music from the score to West Side Story has a long history of performance by the New York Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein (Music Director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 — having served as its Assistant Conductor from 1943 to 1944 — then named Laureate Conductor for life)
revisited his score for West Side Story in the opening weeks of 1961 (the year that the film version was
released) and extracted nine sections to assemble into what he called the Symphonic Dances.
The impetus was a gala fund-raising concert for the New York Philharmonic’s pension fund, to be
held the evening before Valentine’s Day. The event was styled as an overt lovefest, to celebrate not
only Bernstein’s involvement with the Orchestra up
to that time, but also the fact that he had agreed
that very month to a new contract that would ensure his presence for another seven years.
In the interest of efficiency, Bernstein’s colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had just
completed the orchestration for the film version
of West Side Story, suggested appropriate sections of the score to Bernstein, who placed them
not in the order in which they occur in the musical, but instead in a new, uninterrupted sequence
derived from a strictly musical rationale. Two of
the show’s most popular songs are found in the
pages of the Symphonic Dances: “Somewhere”
and (in the Cha-Cha section) “Maria.”
— James M. Keller, New York Philharmonic
Program Annotator
Bernstein, prior to the opening of West Side Story,
the musical, in 1957
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more than a year of research by Eleonor M.
Sandresky of The Leonard Bernstein Office
brought to light a trove of important finds in
private collections and library archives
around the country. From materials discovered in the papers of orchestrator Sid Ramin,
as well as in the archives of conductor /
music supervisor Johnny Green, director
Robert Wise, and producer Walter Mirisch,
Sandresky was able to assemble a mockup short score (which pares down the full
score to a few staves of notation) of the complete film. Garth Edwin Sunderland, senior
music editor for the Bernstein Office, restored and adapted the orchestration for live
performance. At the same time Sunderland
oversaw the creation of a brand-new engraving of the entire film score, right down to
Sources and Inspirations
The music of West Story Story does not end with the final fadeout on the characters. Orchestral
underscoring continues through the end credits, and audience members are encouraged to stay
and experience this sequence, which is itself considered a classic work of cinematic art. The graffiti-like end credits were created by legendary graphic designer Saul Bass, whose work in Hollywood had previously included collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock on titles and graphics for North
by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho. Bass also designed the overture graphics, in which changing
color blocks play over a line drawing that dissolve into an aerial view of Manhattan, pulling the
action to the Upper West Side.
In Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, author Pat Kirkham explained that the West Side Story
end credits were shifted from the beginning to the end of the film to accommodate the lengthy list
needed for acknowledgements of the Broadway production as well as the film:
They also gave viewers time to compose themselves after the tragic climax. Saul likened the effect to a decompression chamber: “The epilogue is a recapitulation of the environment within
which the film’s story takes place. Thus all the walls and surfaces (which were part of the background of the story) are intimately explored. As the camera moves over these walls, fences,
doors and signs, it discovers, among the graffiti on them, different credits.”
— The Editors
End titles echo the graffiti-marked walls of the West Side Story landscape
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last-minute modifications made on the scoring stage in 1961.
The final result is a presentation of West Side
Story unlike any in the history of this screen
musical — held, appropriately, at a concert site
that its composer called home for so many
decades and that sits in the very New York City
neighborhood that inspired its creation.
— Steven Smith, Emmy–nominated documentary producer, journalist, and author of
the biography A Heart at Fire’s Center: The
Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann.
Instrumentation: three flutes (all doubling
piccolo), two oboes and English horn, three
clarinets (one doubling E-flat clarinet) and
bass clarinet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone
(doubling baritone saxophone), soprano
saxophone (doubling baritone and bass
saxophone), two bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three trombones,
tuba, timpani, drum set, steel chimes, orchestra bells, vibraphone, xylophone, marimba,
triangle, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals,
finger cymbals, cowbells, tam-tam, bongos,
congas, timbales, pitched drums, snare drum,
large bass drum, tambourine, maracas, guiro,
wood block, temple blocks, castanets, claves,
ratchet, slide whistle, piano (doubling celeste),
harp, guitar (doubling electric guitar, Spanish
guitar, and mandolin), and strings.
Angels and Muses
As the story goes, no one was more surprised by the sound of Maria’s singing in the film adaptation of West Side Story than Natalie Wood. The actress had every intention of singing the part, and
recorded songs during production. But unbeknownst to her, studio execs had another idea — hiring
singer Marni Nixon to dub Maria’s songs. Uncredited, Nixon had provided the singing voice for
Deborah Kerr in The King and I (earning $420 for her efforts) and An Affair to Remember, and
would later do the same for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Before becoming the best-known
anonymous voice in the land, Nixon had
established herself as a concert performer, and she appeared with the New
York Philharmonic on almost 20 occasions, including a 1961 televised Young
People’s Concert and the 2007 production of My Fair Lady (as Mrs. Higgins).
The New York Philharmonic will miss seeing this friend of the Orchestra, who
died on July 25.
— The Editors
Nixon and two Andrés — Previn (left) and
Kostelanetz — at the New York
Philharmonic, ca. 1965
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